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ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

A dusty spiral galaxy appears to be rotating on edge, like a pinwheel,
as it slides through the larger, bright galaxy NGC 1275, in this
NASA Hubble Space Telescope image.

These images, taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2
(WFPC2), show traces of spiral structure accompanied by dramatic dust
lanes and bright blue regions that mark areas of active star formation.
Detailed observations of NGC 1275 indicate that the dusty material
belongs to a spiral system seen nearly edge-on in the foreground. The
second galaxy, lying beyond the first, is actually a giant elliptical
with peculiar faint spiral structure in its nucleus. These galaxies
are believed to be colliding at over 6 million miles per hour.

NGC 1275 is about 235 million light-years away in the constellation
Perseus. Embedded in the center of a large cluster of galaxies known as
the Perseus Cluster, it is also known to emit a powerful signal at both
X-ray and radio frequencies. The galaxy collision causes the gas and dust already existing in the
central bright galaxy to swirl into the center of the object. The X-ray
and radio emission indicates the probable existence of a black hole at
the bright galaxy's center.

While the dark dusty material in the Hubble image falls inward,
NGC 1275 displays intricate filamentary structures at a much larger
scale outside the image. This is a typical feature of bright cluster
galaxies. Additional observational evidence of strong interactions
between at least two galaxies, and possibly a few smaller galaxies,
includes the formation of new stars and large star clusters. Although
similar in shape to the old globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy,
NGC 1275's clusters are much younger and contain 100,000 to a million
stars each.

This image was created from archived blue and red Hubble WFPC2 data
taken in 1995 by John Trauger (JPL) and Jon Holtzman (NMSU). The Hubble
Heritage team, along with collaborators Megan Donahue, Jennifer Mack,
and Mark Voit (STScI), took follow-up WFPC2 observations at infrared
wavelengths in 2001 to help produce this full-color image.